Themes, Arguments, and Ideas

The Nihilism of Contemporary Europe

While most of his contemporaries looked on the late nineteenth
century with unbridled optimism, confident in the progress of science and
the rise of the German state, Nietzsche saw his age facing a fundamental
crisis in values. With the rise of science, the Christian worldview
no longer held a prominent explanatory role in people’s lives, a
view Nietzsche captures in the phrase “God is dead.” However, science
does not introduce a new set of values to replace the Christian
values it displaces. Nietzsche rightly foresaw that people need
to identify some source of meaning and value in their lives, and if
they could not find it in science, they would turn to aggressive nationalism
and other such salves. The last thing Nietzsche would have wanted
was a return to traditional Christianity, however. Instead, he sought
to find a way out of nihilism through the creative and willful affirmation
of life.

The Doctrine of the Will to Power

On one level, the will to power is a psychological insight:
our fundamental drive is for power as realized in independence and
dominance. This will is stronger than the will to survive, as martyrs willingly
die for a cause if they feel that associating themselves with that
cause gives them greater power, and it is stronger than the will to
sex, as monks willingly renounce sex for the sake of a greater cause.
While the will to power can manifest itself through violence and
physical dominance, Nietzsche is more interested in the sublimated
will to power, where people turn their will to power inward and
pursue self-mastery rather than mastery over others. An Indian mystic,
for instance, who submits himself to all sorts of physical deprivation
gains profound self-control and spiritual depth, representing a
more refined form of power than the power gained by the conquering
barbarian.

On a deeper level, the will to power explains the fundamental, changing
aspect of reality. According to Nietzsche, everything is in flux,
and there is no such thing as fixed being. Matter is always moving
and changing, as are ideas, knowledge, truth, and everything else.
The will to power is the fundamental engine of this change. For Nietzsche,
the universe is primarily made up not of facts or things but rather
of wills. The idea of the human soul or ego is just a grammatical
fiction, according to Nietzsche. What we call “I” is really a chaotic
jumble of competing wills, constantly struggling to overcome one
another. Because change is a fundamental aspect of life, Nietzsche
considers any point of view that takes reality to be fixed and objective,
be it religious, scientific, or philosophical, as life denying.
A truly life-affirming philosophy embraces change and recognizes
in the will to power that change is the only constant in the world.

The Perspectivist Conception of Truth

Nietzsche is critical of the very idea of objective truth.
That we should think there is only one right way of considering
a matter is only evidence that we have become inflexible in our
thinking. Such intellectual inflexibility is a symptom of saying
“no” to life, a condition that Nietzsche abhors. A healthy mind
is flexible and recognizes that there are many different ways of
considering a matter. There is no single truth but rather many.

At this point, interpreters of Nietzsche differ. Some
argue that Nietzsche believes there is such a thing as truth but
that there is no single correct perspective on it. Just as we cannot
get the full picture of what an elephant is like simply by looking
at its leg or looking at its tail or looking at its trunk, we cannot
get a reasonable picture of any truth unless we look at it from
multiple perspectives. Others, particularly those who value Nietzsche’s
early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” argue that
Nietzsche believes the very idea of “truth” to be a lie. Truth is
not an elephant that we must look at from multiple perspectives
under this view. Rather, truth is simply the name given to the point
of view of the people who have the power to enforce their point
of view. The only reality is the will to power, and truth, like
morality, is just another fig leaf placed on top of this reality.

Christianity as a Life-Denying Force

Throughout his work, particularly in The Antichrist, Nietzsche writes
scathingly about Christianity, arguing that it is fundamentally
opposed to life. In Christian morality, Nietzsche sees an attempt
to deny all those characteristics that he associates with healthy
life. The concept of sin makes us ashamed of our instincts and our
sexuality, the concept of faith discourages our curiosity and natural
skepticism, and the concept of pity encourages us to value and cherish
weakness. Furthermore, Christian morality is based on the promise
of an afterlife, leading Christians to devalue this life in favor
of the beyond. Nietzsche argues that Christianity springs from resentment
for life and those who enjoy it, and it seeks to overthrow health
and strength with its life-denying ethic. As such, Nietzsche considers
Christianity to be the hated enemy of life.

The Revaluation of All Values

As the title of one of his books suggests, Nietzsche seeks
to find a place “beyond good and evil.” One of Nietzsche’s fundamental achievements
is to expose the psychological underpinnings of morality. He shows
that our values are not themselves fixed and objective but rather
express a certain attitude toward life. For example, he argues that
Christian morality is fundamentally resentful and life denying,
devaluing natural human instincts and promoting weakness and the
idea of an afterlife, the importance of which supercedes that of
our present life. Nietzsche’s aim is not so much to replace Christian
morality with another morality. Rather, he aims to expose the very
concept of morality as being a fig leaf placed on top of our fundamental
psychological drives to make them seem more staid and respectable.
By exposing morality as a fiction, Nietzsche wants to encourage
us to be more honest about our drives and our motives and more realistic
in the attitude we take toward life. Such honesty and realism, he
contends, would cause a fundamental “revaluation of all values.”
Without morality, we would become an entirely different species
of being, and a healthier species of being at that.

Man as Bridge Between Animal and Overman

Nietzsche contends that humanity is a transition, not
a destination. We ceased to be animals when we taught ourselves
to control our instincts for the sake of greater gains. By learning
to resist some of our natural impulses, we have been able to forge
civilizations, develop knowledge, and deepen ourselves spiritually.
Rather than directing our will to power outward to dominate those
around us, we have directed it inward and gained self-mastery. However,
this struggle for self-mastery is arduous, and humanity is constantly tempted
to give up. Christian morality and contemporary nihilism are just
two examples of worldviews that express the desire to give up on
life. We come to see life as blameworthy or meaningless as a way
of easing ourselves out of the struggle for self-mastery. Nietzsche’s
concept of the overman is the destination toward which we started
heading when we first reined in our animal instincts. The overman
has the self-mastery that animals lack but also the untrammeled
instincts and good conscience that humans lack. The overman is profoundly
in love with life, finding nothing in it to complain about, not
even the constant suffering and struggle to which he willingly submits
himself.

The Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence

While it is hard to give a definitive account of the eternal
recurrence, we can undoubtedly claim that it involves a supreme
affirmation of life. On one level, it expresses the view that time
is cyclical and that we will live every moment of our lives over
and over an infinite number of times, each time exactly the same.
In other words, each passing moment is not fleeting but rather echoes
for all eternity. Nietzsche’s ideal is to be able to embrace the
eternal recurrence and live in affirmation of this idea. In other
words, we should aim to live conscious of the fact that each moment
will be repeated infinitely, and we should feel only supreme joy
at the prospect.

On another level, the doctrine of the eternal recurrence
involves Nietzsche’s distinctive metaphysical notions. Nietzsche
contends that there is no such thing as being: everything is always
changing, always in a state of becoming. Because nothing is fixed,
there are no “things” that we can distinguish and set apart from
other “things.” All of reality is intertwined, such that we cannot
pass judgment on one aspect of reality without passing judgment
on all of reality. In other words, we cannot feel regret for one
aspect of our lives and joy for another because these two aspects
of our lives cannot properly be distinguished from one another.
In recognizing that all of life is one indistinguishable swirl of
becoming, we are faced with the simple choice of saying yes to
all life or no to all life. Naturally, Nietzsche
contends that the yes-saying attitude is preferable.